With Love From SJ

Have Heart & Conversation Pit

Collage on recycled book cover

2025

Dalhousie Art Gallery’s 70th Annual Student, Staff, Faculty and Alumni Exhibition

This year’s theme, Golden Hour, celebrates the Gallery’s legacy and the distinctive atmosphere created by its deep golden walls and invites reflection, radiance, and transformation. Artists were encouraged to respond to this luminous setting and consider what “golden” might evoke: illumination, memory, ritual, legacy, value, richness, and resilience.

My collage works, Conversation Pit and Have Heart, draw on these ideas through layered imagery and the use of old book covers. By working with books, objects that have long carried stories, knowledge, and collective memory, I gesture toward the history of the book as a vessel that connects people with ideas and with one another.

Conversation Pit evokes the warmth and intimacy of shared dialogue, while Have Heart features a book cover with its pages removed, exposing a raw interior that speaks to vulnerability, honesty, and the act of offering one’s inner self. Together, the works engage the golden space by highlighting connection, emotional presence, and the enduring legacy of shared human experience.